Monthly Archives: March 2018

MY YOGA STORY: MORE LOVE, LESS FEAR, MORE OF WHAT YOU WANT IN YOUR LIFE

I started going to yoga about six weeks before everything fell apart. My husband-at-the-time and I had been trying to have a baby for almost two years at that point, and I was starting to lose hope that it would ever happen for us. But I heard a story about a woman who struggled with fertility for years, and when she started a regular yoga practice, she became pregnant within six months.

That was enough to convince me.

I walked down the street and signed up.

It had been a few years since I’d been in a regular routine of moving my body, but it didn’t seem like all that long since I’d been a distance runner. I had completed several half-marathons and a full marathon. So when the instructor suggested that for my first few classes I should focus on simply staying in the room, I balked a little.

I mean, how hard could it be to stay in a room?

That was before the class started and the heat pressed in and I realized how far you can get from yourself without even knowing it; how long you can go without paying any attention to the fact that you have been barely breathing.

Those first few classes were miserable.

I felt like I might be dying—and I was barely doing anything. Just sitting there on my mat. The only reason I kept coming back was that the instructor said yoga would help us to get three things, and I wanted each of those three things:

1. More love

2. Less fear

3. More of what we want in our lives.

I hoped she was right. I hoped yoga would help me get what I wanted.

Six weeks later, everything fell apart.

It was a normal Thursday afternoon when I uncovered the truth of my marriage, and suddenly the fact that we hadn’t been able to become pregnant wasn’t the problem anymore. The day I found what I found, a friend asked me if I was surprised, and I told a her to imagine she had been in a fist fight for years with a blindfold on.

Then today, someone took the blindfold off.

No, I was not surprised.

We hold truths in our bodies that are too big for our minds.

The irony is not lost on me that I went to yoga to get pregnant and instead ended up getting a divorce. But I am learning the hard and beautiful truth that sometimes what we think we want is not what we actually want, and that the process of getting what we want usually involves several things we did not want at all.

So I kept going to yoga.

One of the things I have loved most about yoga is that there is nowhere to hide.

In life we hide behind make-up or name brands or job titles or relationship statuses. In yoga, in that hot room with all those smelly, sweaty not-so-covered-up bodies, there is nowhere to go except… right there.

In the truth.

The fleshy, terrible, magical, beautiful truth of you.

It’s a terrifying and beautiful thing to to see yourself so completely.

To look at where you are weak or soft or grieving or heartbroken and let love go there.

What a strange and petrifying feeling to find that all the pieces of the puzzle you had been fighting to hold together weren’t even your puzzle pieces in the first place, and that all that love you were dying to have had always been right there in front of you.

All you have to do is get soft enough to receive it.

All you had to do was stop trying so hard, and relax enough to let it in. That winter, I filed for divorce.

I walked into the attorney’s office and did the thing I swore to myself I would never do, the thing I had judged others for doing, the thing I had wanted to do for longer than I could even allow myself to admit. The truth does this to you, I guess. Humbles you. Makes you human again. Gets you back into alignment with yourself.

Yoga does this to you.

More love.

Less fear.

More of what you want in your life.

And after signing all of those terrible, beautiful, life-altering papers, I went to yoga again. I fought and cried and melted into my mat again, and again and again.

It was all I had. My offering. It was all it took.

What I’m learning from yoga is the same thing I’m learning from the rest of my life—which is that we are entitled to our efforts, but not to our outcomes; that we can either be in control, or be in love, but not both.

I’m learning to be in love. I’m choosing to be in love.

Several things have changed in my life since those early days of yoga—beyond the fact that I am finally breathing again. I feel more comfortable in my own skin. I sleep better. I have better tools to calm my own anxiety. I’m more focused and productive. I feel more confident, more capable.

I’m stronger and also softer. I’ve even fallen in love.

And although in those early days yoga seemed like the hardest thing I had ever done, I’m learning now that it is also the easiest—the easiest and the best and the most life-changing thing you could ever do, showing up. Getting on your mat. Starting where you are.

Giving it all you have.

Slowly, without even knowing it, we are all getting where we’re trying to go.